Undo an untar in the wrong place

tar tfz filename.tar.gz | xargs rm

October 19, 1999

This command is useful to delete the effects of
accidental untarring into the wrong directory.

It works by passing the list of filenames
from the stdout of the tar command into xargs,
which in turn runs rm with the list of files
as arguments. You could, of course, use it to run
any command on all the filenames in a tar ball.